Chapter 95: Glass Cannon

Nothing sharpens a crowd like money.

Sterling’s bounty rolled across the Scarred Waste, and the change in Ironclad was immediate.

A hundred thousand dollars, one head. To the melee players closing in, Kael stopped looking like a man and started looking like a winning lottery ticket with legs.

Blades came up. Boots hammered the cracked earth. A wall of steel surged toward the lone figure in the churned dust, while behind it the archers and mages found their mark and let loose.

The sky lit up. Arrows and spells came down in a glittering storm, converging on Kael from every angle at once.

Millions of viewers held their breath.

>"Oh no. They’ve got him!"

>"Called it. Three seconds of cool, tops."

>"Monster stats don’t mean anything once the master drops. That’s the whole class!"

>"Number one on the Ascendant Rankings, and he’s still a glass cannon. Beastlords are paper."

> "Even the toughest tank on the server would fold under that. A summoner doesn’t stand a chance."

>"One volley and he’s gone."

>"Serves him right for showing off."

Kael didn’t so much as glance at the storm.

He lifted his left hand, almost lazily, and the air around his fingers began to hum.

Bloodbind.

A crimson thread snapped taut between him and the Void Colossus across the field. For one heartbeat, they shared a single pulse.

Then his eyes narrowed, and he read the sky like a card player reading a table, tracing the arc of every incoming shaft.

He slid sideways like smoke.

His leathers were built for speed, and his agility sat far beyond anything a player at this level could hope to match.

His boots barely seemed to touch the ground. Arrows hissed into the dirt where he’d been standing, shafts quivering. A dozen spells burst on empty earth.

Not all of them missed.

A good portion of the barrage still found him, enough to leave any other player hanging by a thread, even a knight in full plate, one breath from the respawn light.

Kael simply absorbed it.

The Skyborn Bloodline doubled his attribute growth, so his base stats had towered over everyone else’s from day one.

On top of that he wore a full set of Legendary-grade gear, and the Beastsoul Relic at his throat fed him a twenty-percent bonus to every attribute.

His resistances now rivaled the best tank on the server.What reached him was almost an insult.

And Bloodbind shoved eighty percent of the remainder straight onto the Colossus, which shrugged it off without noticing.

When the last of the volley died away, Kael’s health bar had slipped by perhaps a tenth.

One tenth, after two thousand players had thrown everything they had at him.

A knot of melee fighters crashed in from the front, snarling, weapons high. Kael turned to meet them and lifted the long whip at his side.

It wasn’t the weapon he’d carried a day earlier. The old Wyrmscale Serpentlash, level twenty-five, had been retired.

In its place hung a Legendary Briarblood Lash, level thirty-nine, a coil of dark crimson cord studded with thorns and barbs, with a five-percent lifesteal bound into the weave.

Lightning crawled up its length.

Stormlash.

Five strokes cracked across the field in the space of a single breath. The air shrieked. Five charging players were flung backward like rag dolls and hit the ground with their health bars gutted.

Five green numbers drifted up above Kael’s head, one after another, as the lash drank back every point he’d lost. By the time the fifth faded, his health and mana had climbed almost to full.

At the back of the formation, Damian Sterling went rigid.His face twisted, and the rage he’d been holding down finally broke loose.

"Useless!" he screamed. "Two thousand of you, and you can’t kill one Beastlord? What are you good for? Where are your control skills? Stunning Shot, Gale Snare, pin him down and finish him!"

His officers passed the order along, and the nearest players obeyed. Stuns and snares streaked out in a bright stream, and every single one landed.

None of them worked.

The damage registered, small and unremarkable. But the control effects riding on every skill simply failed, sliding off Kael like rain off glass.

He didn’t freeze, didn’t slow, didn’t stumble. Not for a single second.His face had gone cold, and a murderous light had come into his eyes.

He moved through Ironclad’s ranks like a ghost walking through a house, turning aside nearly every ranged attack, the lash flickering in his hand like something alive.

Each stroke tore a hole in the line. Each stroke fed back whatever the guild had taken from him.

He wasn’t fighting his way through Ironclad. He was strolling through it.

In minutes, he’d cut down more than a thousand players, and he hadn’t slowed once.

On the stream, the chat went nuclear.

>"WHAT?! Is Unrivaled actually that strong?!"

>"He’s a Beastlord! Where are those stats coming from?!"

>"He’s alone in the middle of them and he’s tearing the whole line apart!"

>"Is this really a Beastlord?!"

>"This is insane. This is completely insane."

>"He has to be wearing something that blocks control effects. No other way he survives that focus fire."

>"Ironclad is finished."

The viewers had it right.

Ironclad threw itself at Kael again and again, in waves and in clusters, and every wave broke.

They simply couldn’t kill him fast enough. And while they tried, the companions tore through the rest of the field, and the guild bled out in the open.

Two regiments, a thousand apiece, fully geared and fully prepared, had lost more than half their strength. The survivors had stopped fighting. Their faces were chalk-white. Weapons sagged.

A few began to back away, then a dozen, then the whole mass was turning, running, scattering across the wasteland with no thought left but escape.

"Damn it!" someone screamed at the fleeing backs. "I’ll remember this!"

Sterling stared at the man walking toward him through the wreckage, lash trailing from one hand, a wake of fallen players behind him. Something cold slid down his spine, and his face went the color of ash.

He swore, hoarse and vicious, and rounded on the few officers still beside him.

"A man who runs lives to fight another day! You, you, and you, hold him off. Get me back to the city!"

He didn’t wait for an answer. He ripped a return scroll from his belt and crushed it in his fist, and a pale light began to spiral up around his body.

Kael watched the glow rise and didn’t hurry.

Sterling was the reason he had come. He wasn’t about to let the man slip away through a doorway of light.

Take him.

The command passed through his mind, quiet as breath.

High overhead, a shrill cry split the sky. Thunder Roc had shaken off the stun, and now it dropped out of the clouds in a long, shrieking dive, golden fire streaming from its wings.

One enormous talon reached down and closed around Sterling.